Conroy blasts Coalition broadband plans

Stephen Conroy is hoping to convince Australians that the Coalition is offering a second-rate broadband policy Tamara Voninski

Joanna Heath

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has accused the Coalition of planning to disconnect nine million Australians from the National Broadband Network.

“Malcolm Turnbull is trying to pretend he is building Labor’s NBN. He’s not planning on building anything in the footprint of 2.4 million homes. He is going to spend $20 billion and millions of Australians will get no improvement and no change,” Senator Conroy said in Canberra in a pre-emptive salvo to the launch of the opposition’s rival broadband plan on Tuesday.

“We will connect nine million homes, he will not. These are his numbers. Fibre-to-the-node, 9 million people [under the Coalition’s plan]. That’s nine million people not getting fibre-to-the-home.”

Senator Conroy criticised a part of the Coalition’s plan that will require the purchasing of parts of existing copper network from Telstra to facilitate the ‘fibre-to-the-node’ method of operation.

“I can’t find a dumber piece of policy than buying the copper off Telstra. Come on down, Alan Bond. Kerry Packer would be laughing all the way to the bank if he found a mug willing to buy Telstra’s copper network. It costs $1 billion a year just to maintain,” Senator Conroy said.

Senator Conroy again denied Coalition claims that the cost of building the network would blow out to $90 billion, calling them “concocted figures”.

“At this stage, we’ve signed over $10 billion in contracts, we’re in the process of renegotiating the Labor contracts at the moment. Claims about cost blowouts have not been substantiated,” Senator Conroy said.

The Australian Financial Review

BY Joanna Heath

Joanna is online political correspondent, based in our Canberra newsroom.